The joy of being sick....

Im not going to go into too much detail but the objectif of this entry is to share some of the more unplesant things of being in a third world country....
About 1 week after my arrival my intestins started working up.... lets just say that i had to run to the bathroom 7-10 times a day.... not to mention the pain in my gut. Anyways after enduring 1 week of that, I finally asked to have a lovely stool test ( yes yes i had to crap in a pot and go over and hand it to the guys in the lab that were finding it all very funny. They kept asking me what i had eaten!! I was afraid of having picked up parasites again (i got that last year in Senegal) Anyways I saw 2 italien doctors (many Italiens here) and they gave me a few pills to relax my intestins and slow them down and said to come back when my results were in. Finally after waiting 3 days they found out I didn't have parasites (yaie) but I did have Shigella, bacterial dysentry, which is pretty disgusting when you realize that Shigella's transmission is what they call "feces the mouth".... I have no idea how in the world did i pick that up!! Anyways the 2 Italien doctors were funny about it, here they call that bacteria "la mangeuse de caca" lol. They said that if I had got that in Canada I would have been placed in quaratine for it is the cousin of Cholera and dangerous for epedemics. However here in Burkina FAso, they simply give you pills and let you go home! So they gave me a huge pack of Italien samples of Cippro (anti-biotics) for 10 days and after that I will have to crap in a pot again.... lovely.
The good news is that after 4 days of anti-biotics I feel pretty good! Thats the number 1 adavantage of working in a health center and being in the Capital (access to health care). I would have been a whole other story if I had been en brousse.....
Lets just cross our fingers I don't pick up any more bacteria....